Tuesday, August 4, 2015

I will leave it to you to decide whether Daniel Drezner is
correctly characterizing Donald Trump’s campaign theme, but he seems to have
gotten close enough to warrant attention:

On the
Sunday talk shows, Trump made variations of the same argument he made in 2012 —
that as president he would be able to bring back lost manufacturing jobs
from China and Mexico. If there’s been a policy “theme” to Trump’s campaign —
and my colleague David
Fahrenthold cogently explains why I put quotes around that word — it’s
that past U.S. presidents have been bad trade negotiators and that because of
these bad trade deals the rest of the world is somehow fleeing the U.S.
manufacturing sector. This is a message he’s delivered again
and again and again.

Is it true? Did previous administrations negotiate badly and
ship American jobs overseas? Or were they corrupted by corporate influences to
sell out American workers?

The message is seductive. In fact, it is so seductive that
it bears more than a passing resemblance to the underlying thesis of Michael
Moore’s movie: “Roger and Me.” While Moore blames it all on greedy capitalists,
Trump blames it on incompetent government officials. Perhaps that makes him a champion of free trade, but one does wonder?

Drezner responds that the Trump narrative is factually
inaccurate:

To repeat
a point I’ve made before (and will have to make again because
this is a powerful myth), the truth is that while a small fraction of American
manufacturing jobs migrated overseas over the past few decades, a far greater
fraction of manufacturing jobs simply disappeared and are not coming
back. The far bigger driver of these job losses is the creative
destruction that comes from technological innovation and productivity
increases.

And Drezner quotes Charles Kenny, writing in Bloomberg
Business:

Pretty
much every economy around the world has a low or declining share of
manufacturing jobs. According to OECD data, the U.K. and Australia have seen
their share of manufacturing drop by around two-thirds since 1971. Germany’s
share halved, and manufacturing’s contribution to gross domestic product there
fell from 30 percent in 1980 to 22 percent today. In South Korea, a late
industrializer and exemplar of miracle growth, the manufacturing share of
employment rose from 13 percent in 1970 to 28 percent in 1991; it’s fallen to
17 percent today.

As for the recent news that a Chinese textile manufacturer
is relocating some of its operations to America, it appears that the new plant
will not provide very many jobs.

So reports the New York Times:

The
work is highly automated, with the factory’s 32 production lines churning out
about 85 tons of yarn a day. Even when Keer opens a second factory next year,
it will hire just 500 workers, a fraction of the thousands of workers who
toiled at cotton mills across the South for much of the 19th and 20th centuries
— a big reason Keer is able to keep costs down.

For the record, it does not seem commensurate to compare the
labor force at one factory with that of the entirety of the South, but still,
the new mills, like many other new manufacturing facilities, are not labor
intensive places. As I reported yesterday, even Chinese factories are discovering the benefits to replacing humans with robots.

Will anyone call out Donald Trump on this deception at
Thursday’s debate? One suspects that the candidates will not do so. Perhaps the
moderators will.

As for Trump’s ability to negotiate great trade deals, the
truth is: he has never done it. If that is sufficient grounds to support his
candidacy, good luck.